Collections have public value because they have been financed by public money and because they provide essential information to shape our identities. GLAMs have in the past regulated access to their collection via their physical buildings and libraries but, as the internet has become a preferred source of information and entertainment, are increasingly adopting the digital terrain. Wikimedia is of course only one of many players currently active in the digital realm (e.g. Google Art Institute, Europeana, etc.). What distinguishes Wikimedia platforms as an attractive way to open up your collections?

The catalogi of the Flemish public libraries draws information about authors from Wikipedia. How do you realise this for your organisation and what is the advantage of working with links based on Wikidata?

Olaf Janssen & Tim De Haan, National Library of the Netherlands (KB) & National Archives of the Netherlands (NA) – Joining forces with Wikipedia – reasons, experiences and impact

In this talk Tim and Olaf will explain how and why joining forces with Wikipedia fits in the bigger open data strategies of both institutions. Starting from a brief historic overview of their joint Wikipedian-in-Residence project in 2013-14, they will not only explain how the KB and the NA have been collaborating with Wikipedia and its volunteer community over the last couple of years, but also which positive impacts it has had for the exposure, distribution and reuse of their collections.

In recent years, there have been many initiatives which have sought to bridge the gap between the fashion world and the Wikipedia community. Sandra Fauconnier and Dieter Suls share their experience with putting fashion content on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata and setting up initiatives such as fashion edit-a-thons.

The Rijksmuseum is one of the forerunners of open collection data in the world. In 2011, the museum released a considerable amount of its collection data with a CC-BY licence. In 2013, all available collection data was released with a CC0 1.0 licence. What has happened since then? And what is missing in this official story that has been told over and over again? How do you consolidate and extend that openness in a way that supports the mission of the museum and the needs of its users? What are the needs in digital (art) historical and technical art research and how does that align with the research services a museum can offer? A peak into the current projects and future challenges the Rijksmuseum is facing.

In 2013 the Flemish Art Collection (VKC) approached PACKED for support in the renewal of their portal website. PACKED suggested to consider looking beyond portal websites as experience has shown that they tend to have a limited reach and to consider publishing their digital collections as open data to render them (re-)usable and enrichable. This pilot project involved the publication of VKC data on Wikimedia platforms, parallel to the development of their own data infrastructure (the datahub). PACKED’s participation to Wikimedia Belgium’s Wiki Loves Art 2017 photography contest provided a way to experiment with adding images to these data while waiting for policy change in the rights management of the digital surrogates.

Wikimedia’s open database Wikidata is currently the only way to do something with linked open data (LOD) for small organisations as it does not require large investments and automatically prompts institutions to publish their collections as open data.